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Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann — a favorite among evangelicals and socially Republican voters — left her conservative Evangelical congregation just days before launching her White House campaign.

CNN reports that the Minnesota congresswoman and her husband Marcus asked to be released from their membership to the Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, MN, last month. They had belonged to the church for more than 10 years.

According to church officials, the church council granted the request on June 21, less than a week before Bachmann announced her presidential bid in Waterloo, Iowa, on June 27.

When asked by CNN about the Bachmanns’ leaving the church, Salem Lutheran Church pastor Marcus Birkholz said, “I’ve been asked to make no comments regarding them and their family.”

Salem Lutheran Church belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, a theologically conservative denomination with approximately 390,000 members in the U.S. and Canada. A spokesman for WELS told CNN he did not believe the Bachmanns had joined another congregation.

Bachmann's decision to leave the church may have something to do with WELS tenets, which are controversial even among other evangelicals.

Creationism — the account of creation given in Genesis 1-3 is factual and historical. They reject evolution and any attempt to harmonize scripture with evolution.

Homosexuality is a choice and a sin.

The wife is a "submissive helper," who recognizes that God has made her husband the head of his family.

The church rejects any view that looks "upon people as basically good in nature; that consider natural tendencies to be mere weaknesses, which are not sinful; or that fail to recognize their total spiritual depravity and their inability to please God."